Where You From?

Where You From? is a glimpse into the hometowns of twelve different people, exploring the ways personalities can be shaped by place. Most of the writers are from small American towns, which are described with equal warmth and disdain. Hope, who put the zine together, sets the tone with an introduction about her visit to Sicily, the home of her family, and how this compares with Baton Rouge, her actual hometown. She makes the interesting point that the romantic image of an ancestral homeland always seems more attractive than home itself, but also that this may be because her Italian “wasn’t good enough for me to understand complaints or banal conversation”. It’s exactly this sense of the banal which drives the contributors to describe their towns so vividly; the strictures of the suburbs and the yearning to escape, followed by the need to return. In among tales of open highways and picket fences, however, is a piece by Steve, who writes about growing up in Boston, Lincolnshire: “a town that has to make do with what it has”. Although he eventually moved to Nottingham, Steve recalls a point during his teens when he couldn’t imagine wanting to live anywhere else, simply because the local punk scene had grown so good.